What a Person Consists Of: Exploring Identity and Loss in the Latest Book by Maya Kucherskaya

2023-07-14 07:00:27

Maya Kucherskaya, the author of “Modern Patericon” and “Teti Moti”, is working on a new book, the main theme of which she herself determined – “what a person consists of.”

“What remains of a person if his past is taken away from him, for example? His childhood memories, how his mother drove him on a sled through a blizzard to a kindergarten, and he was wrapped up to his eyes and saw with these eyes only the snowy haze and his mother’s back? What if we take away his native language? And his favorite potato with sour cream and dill? Is there anything left at all? It’s very scary for me to think regarding it to the end, but that’s why I’m writing regarding it, ”Kucherskaya said in an interview with Vedomosti.

Kucherskaya’s latest book at the moment – Nikolai Leskov’s biography The Missed Genius – was published in 2021 and brought her the Big Book Award.

The writer did not specify whether the new book will be a novel or a collection of short stories, as well as when to expect publication. The new work, according to Kucherskaya, will be “definitely not regarding today.” “To tell regarding today in the language of fiction, distance is needed,” she notes.

Kucherskaya is a professor at the Faculty of Philology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and the founder of the Creative Writing School literary workshops. She became widely known as a writer in the mid-2000s thanks to the collection Modern Patericon. Her novel “Aunt Motya” in 2013 reached the finals of “Yasnaya Polyana” and “Big Book”.

Leading literary awards are increasingly celebrating historical novels and non-fiction. The head of the expert council of the Big Book, Dmitry Danilov, in a conversation with Vedomosti, explained the success of “historical” literature, including the reader’s request – stories regarding the war, revolution, and the Soviet period are still very popular. Kucherskaya sees last year’s “Big Book” premium layout, when all three first places were taken by “biographical non-fiction”, a kind of escapism, an attempt to find a foothold in the classics.

In recent years, Kucherskaya’s prose has been published in Elena Shubina’s Editing (RESH; an imprint of the Eksmo-AST holding): “They swallowed a fish …” (2016; together with Tatyana Oizerskaya), “You were completely different” ( 2017), the reprint of her debut novel The God of Rain (2023), etc. In total, from 2012 to the present day, the total circulation of her author’s books published in NES (excluding collective collections) is 62,000 copies.

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